This Great Escape

by Andrew Steinmetz

  Seven East housed the brain tumour unit. Neoplasm, Brain. I had been taught in library school to use a controlled vocabulary. Medical Subject Headings, the MESH language. Searching the literature in natural language increased the noise and distorted your results. Expand the tree, that was the way I’d been taught; expand the MESH tree and find the proper terminology on a lower branch—centipede-looking things like Subependymomas and Oligodendroglioma. Unpronounceable units of sound, and so alien, until you encountered the living host—a woman of twenty-eight or a man of forty-nine—up close in the office.

  After they left the library, after performing a medical literature search, often I would pick through discarded photocopies in the wastebasket. Given time I would read more closely about certain clinical trials and about agonists and about cell types studied in research laboratories around the world. I read lots about linear accelerators and the gamma knife. About novel approaches and methods used to breach the blood-brain barrier. And the picture I gathered from all this was of a tidal wave of groundbreaking research spreading through the hemispheres. Reading the occasional case history—the most elegant genre of narrative I have ever come across—I began to appreciate the patient grace with which medical science has taken into its own hands the crash-test biology of all human beings. Even so I recognized there are disaster cases where nature and nurture collide with indifferent force, producing the private consequences and results that defy description. Most of all I sensed that scientific authors understood much more than they ever let on.

  The solicitor was waiting outside Room 707. Briefcase on the floor, he grasped a Styrofoam cup of coffee. “Thank you for coming,” he said, explaining that he’d arrived from Toronto by train in the morning and everything now was rush rush. “This is very important for Judy,” said the solicitor. “Your role is simple. Ten to twenty minutes.”

  I was ushered into the room and introduced. “Hi,” said Judy, a plain hello. Hands tucked in her back pockets, shoulders boosted and slightly turned in, Judy was stereotypical Judy, an athletic figure in blue jeans.

  While her lawyer readied the documents, Judy spoke to me, directly, and ever so casually. “The doctors finally had a look at my films. I got some pretty bad news.” I knew not to stare but caught the patch of stubble above Judy’s left ear. A three square inch area, a defined zone—the cordoned off area where the surgeon went in. “I still have to wait for the radiologist’s report. That’s what they say. But the biopsy showed most of it.”

  Hands clasped behind my back, and submerged in the deep freeze of protocol and decorum, I found it difficult to breathe. What is appropriate? Be here now nowhere else. But I could not help but notice the sprinkler system, sprouting from the ceiling. Metal daisies hanging from irrigation pipes. The bedside table was another familiar hospital item, height adjustable, on wheels, four beige plastic paws concealing black rubber rollers. The table with a lift-up lid, like a school desk, had a mirror hinged on the underside for shaving or for making a mask.

  The solicitor separated the papers into three piles, hesitated, and then retrieved a stamp and ink pad from his briefcase and set them on the high table at the bedside. This is for the car. He righted the stacks, each like a deck of playing cards. I watched him do this and patient Judy watched him. This is for the house. This is for the car. And this is everything else. The solicitor withdrew a couple of steps, and Judy stepped forward. Judy circled, pen ready, before landing the tip. She put her signature on paper and I felt faint as I watched the man who had prepared the will and testament twist a cufflink through the eyehole in his sleeve, winding it like a wristwatch, taken with it.

  Then it was my turn. I signed my name twenty-plus times to the legal documents.

  Years later, I remember every detail of that afternoon, who said what, who did what, though it was and is not much.

  There was a centipede named Oligodendroglioma.

  There was the clerk encased in glass and a row of swans in white making letters.

  There was Judy in blue jeans and a white turtleneck in Room 707.

  Thank you for coming.

  The doctors finally had a look at my films. I got some pretty bad news.

  The solicitor shuffled the papers and cut the deck.

  This is for the house.

  At one point, I turned to the window and touched the ventilation grid set in the window frame, poking my fingertips through. Seven floors up, cars parked bumper to bumper below on University Street.

  This is for the car.

  Two men in green overalls are seated on the curb by the hospital’s west entrance.

  This is everything else.

  One of them drops his cigarette to the ground, the other man packs a ball of tinfoil into his fist.

  An ambulance silently rides up the street.

  Andrew, your turn.

  The men stand. I watch them rise up, and then like synchronized swimmers, yawn, straighten their backs, reaching skywards.

  The Actors’ Entrance

  I TAKE THE SIDE DOOR, the actor’s entrance. Fräulein Asche, from the administrative office, greets me in the lobby.

  “You have found it, alright?”

  “No problem.”

  “Have you gone to his street?” In her middle twenties, Sandra Asche betrays a gentle and natural curiosity in the deceased.

  “Yes.”

  She looks pleased with this answer.

  “But you didn’t have the address.”

  “No.”

  “Shame.”

  Yes, a shame. My attempts to find Michael’s address have been foiled by a highly efficient German bureaucracy and my own suspended belief that knowing such a thing really matters in the end.

  Fräulein Asche’s tour begins at the entrance hall and with a look inside the box office.

  “The theatre employs over two hundred workers,” she informs me. These include the ensemble of actors and a team of artistic directors, and administrative and communications staff.

  When I appear flabbergasted at the number of ‘workers’, she counters, “Yes. Why not?”

  “It’s a good number.”

  “Yes.”

  Onwards: she lead me inside the labyrinth of passageways that connect the dressing rooms and ateliers to machine and storage rooms. Behind stage the air is stale. But here with Fräulein Asche I feel cleverly tucked behind the bulwark, insulated from the inconsequential daily grind. The passageway curves and the passage bends and at last we come upon a dressmaker—finally, one of Thalia’s two hundred employed souls.

  She turns to face us, lips pursed, mouth stuffed with pins, when Sandra asks if we may enter.

  “Of course.”

  I circle the room, a space stretched by floor-to-ceiling mirrors. The dressmaker bows to a piece of material in her lap. Fräulein Asche shows me the door. We exit and turn in the direction of the dressing rooms. I sit in the chair facing a mirror ringed with light bulbs. Here Herr Paryla contemplated his role before a performance? Here he waited before the stage manager called out his name? Was it ‘Michael’ or ‘Junker von Bleichenwang’? Last, it was ‘Sempronius’.

  Fräulein Asche waits in the doorway. I snap another photograph and catch a glimmer of the lyricism which the place holds for me. Behold, he is lost and never found. He leaves and never arrives. Behold, the very old story of the Prodigal Son. Behold, the legend of a young man who did not want to be loved for who he was; mostly, I’m thinking, because Michael Paryla did not love himself. This sounds about right.

  When he left Canada for Germany in 1956, he was twenty–one. Both of his parents had been actors, and both had been trouble for the times: Eva the Mischling and Karl the Communist. There was a curse upon his household, but there was method in blood. He left Canada a young man; empty as a promise he went abroad to become anew, and in the land of his ancestors erased Mike Paryla, line by l
ine, and from city to city searched inside and outside for his new identity.

  Behold, a refugee, displaced since birth, looking for a home in the heart of his father.

  I’m not convinced.

  After returning from Hamburg, I telephoned Michael’s half-brother, Stephan Raky-Paryla. Like father, and like Michael, Stephan Paryla is a stage and movie actor. He lives in Vienna and I had wanted to pay him a visit while in Europe—make a side trip to Austria—but when I had called Stephan before leaving on my trip, he had been reluctant to talk to me.

  I partly understood this reaction. I had called without warning, from Canada, to discuss events which had taken place more than thirty years ago and to ask questions about his father’s first marriage and the death of Stephan’s half-brother. Stephan in return inquired about me, my age, and what my relationship to Michael is, exactly. I chose the route of explanation that ran through Michael’s mother, Eva; I was her grand-nephew; Eva’s brother is my grandfather; my own father and Michael were cousins.

  There was silence at his end. I sensed, however, that Stephan was relieved. He was now recalibrating. I knew that Karl Paryla had the reputation of a womanizer. Maybe Stephan’s initial thought had been that I was an illegitimate child—and not the first to call without prior notice and claim Karl as their father. The very moment this scenario suggested itself I knew it was rooted in the truth. Perhaps there were illegitimate children throughout the land, and over the years, a pretty multiple number had come home to roost. Whatever, I got the feeling Stephan was worried, and that it was not a new worry but an old one, and part of an ongoing story. He thought I was after estate money, a piece of the Paryla pie, if such a sweet thing existed.

  My second call caught Stephan in the bathtub, relaxing, before the night’s performance. His voice bounced across the water and echoed against porcelain. Syntax notwithstanding, Stephan Paryla-Raky’s accent is very English. His online bio promises that he speaks French, German (several dialects), Russian, and Spanish. English is tiddlywinks for him; probably he can quote Shakespeare longer than I would like to listen to it. He was less suspicious of my motives the second time around, and more philosophical. He was smoking a cigarette in the tub, and probably sweating, too. Stephan was a man of experience, someone not easily put off balance. He could play a part in this.

  Eva Steinmetz was my father’s first wife. Michael was born to them in Vienna. Well, I remember a smart boy. Blond. He was a fine guy, a good-looking kid. Handsome and very clever. You know, I didn’t see him very often. This year, I am sixty-one. In 1967, I was nineteen. I lived in Vienna with my father and then in the DDR, in the East. But we would sometimes go to Munich and there I met him several times. As I said, I remember a bright boy, a very likeable fellow. But all in all it was for a very short time that I knew him.

  His death was a bit of a mystery. In such cases, after so many years—what do you say—all tracks lost, the trail goes cold?

  Someone called to him. He asked me to hold on one moment. Then he was back:

  I am sure you know the story. The theatre doctor had been serving him barbiturates. You know what happens, yes? Over time the concentration in the blood increases. He suffered from insomnia and he always took sleeping pills and whiskey mixed with milk to fall asleep. This was his habit. I went with my father to Hamburg and entered his flat and we found it how he had left it. There was the bottle of pills and the glass with milk and whiskey in it. When the ambulance guys found him there in bed he was still alive, and they brought him to the hospital where he died. This apparently was good. If he had survived, he would have been then an idiot. It was better how it happened, that he was too exhausted to regain consciousness.

  So Stephan had visited Michael’s apartment in Hamburg, accompanying his father in 1967. The whiskey and barbiturate cocktail has been part of the story from the beginning, but until now I knew nothing about Michael’s milk habit. I couldn’t get over the image of Stephan, then nineteen, entering the apartment with his father, to inspect the scene, and finding the glass of whiskey and milk and half-bottle of pills, in the place of Michael. The half-glass of milk was a detail to ponder. My father, a retired physician, has an explanation for what happened to his cousin:

  I think that the milk in the whiskey was meant to reduce irritation of the stomach caused by the alcohol. The entire prescription is, really, malpractice, because it was, even then, well-known what happens: people who have taken barbiturates to sleep, wake up during the night—think they have not gone to sleep yet—and either take more barbiturates or more alcohol, and in this way overdose. This is what seems to have happened to Michael.

  Sound reasoning, but it doesn’t get to the bottom of the morbid fascination I felt growing for that half-glass—even as I still had reclined-in-the-tub-Stephan warming to Michael. Michael’s milk turned the stomach uneasily. It symbolized something else surely.

  Milk is for children. Milk is the potion served at night to help little men sleep. Here we have Michael’s father arriving at his son’s deathbed and finding a glass of milk. Whiskey and barbiturates—adult fare, for sure—but the whiteness in the glass clouds the picture.

  After he’d recounted all he could remember, I informed Stephan that in my possession I had three letters his father had written to Eva after Michael’s death. I briefly described the contents. They were remarkable, I told him. Letters of pure expression and deep feeling. Would he like it if I made copies and sent them to him? “No,” he replied. “I lost my father ten or so years ago. I loved my father. Those letters belong to his life. I don’t want to see them or know about them. They belong to him. And to Eva. That was their life. It’s not for me to know about it. I don’t want to read them.”

  Alright. The letters are private. They do belong to his father. The contents and intellectual property, the emotional freight, belong to Karl Paryla. But the more important issue, for Stephan and for his family, is that Eva and Michael complicate the past, perhaps even the present. For me the letters shine a light, but the same words cast shadow in their corner. Fair enough. I could see my way around that. We talked a bit more and at one point I mentioned to Stephan Michael’s part in The Great Escape. He wasn’t aware Michael had been in the movie. Neither did he seem very interested. How could that be? I was astounded. But then I remembered that Michael was uncredited in the first place and, secondly, war films are not for everyone. Perhaps there is no great hunger among a generation as close to the war as Stephan’s is to watch Second World War films. They likely suffer from considerable war fatigue, which is understandable. But, as is often said, they started it. My interest in the movie derives from Michael’s involvement, otherwise I would never have taken an interest in Stalag Luft III. Had Michael been cast for a bit part in, say, Cleopatra instead, the top moneymaker from 1963, I’d be hard pressed trying to link Michael with Ancient Egypt, but to London and Rome I’d have gone, which is where Twentieth Century Fox filmed the movie that just about bankrupt them. I’m trying to say that it’s merely a fluke I have spent so much time researching a Hollywood war movie as opposed to a love story, and that I have no special interest in Nazis and the evil they do. However, there is a problem with this view, which implies that Michael’s involvement in The Great Escape—in that particular movie—was a matter of chance. I don’t think it was chance or coincidence. Unless chance is more determined than it is usually given credit for. Unless chance is a stubborn player after all and bullies and schemes and tips the scales and rules from behind the scenes what should come to be.

  Since events which might as well happen as not do not exist.

  Not, anyway, when your pursuit of the truth falls under a deadline.

  Meanwhile, time is running on and this call is getting expensive and since I know very well that it’s bad manners not to ask an artist about his own work, I inquire innocently if Stephan was making any films these days in Vienna. His reply:

  Here are not so ma
ny American films being made, in Austria or Germany, not any more. In 1978, I was in this series Holocaust, with Meryl Streep and James Wood. I remember going to a restaurant where I talked to Streep for hours. In the film we did it the old way. We taped one-to-one. It was my original voice that was used. I played an SS guy. Sgt. Foltz. This SS guy who shoots a bunch of Jews and leaves them in a ditch.

  I smothered the mouthpiece to kill my gasp. SS. This SS guy. What are the chances? Michael in 1962. Stephan in 1978. What is it about the Paryla clan? They share a father. Anything else?

  Michael Paryla as Don Cesar in a production of Ein Bruderzwist in Habsburg by Franz Grillparzer. The play is about a fratricidal quarrel. (Place and date unknown).

  The stage is raked. Sandra Asche and I sit side-by-side in the upper reaches of seats. She takes a deep breath.

  “Impressive,” I say. From our vantage, high above, the stage has a ruthless quality. What is it? Ambition and promise and dreams put in honest perspective. The uphill battle of make-believe.

  Three figures are at work down on the stage. They keep pointing up, at the lights hanging above them. It looks like they’re discussing arrangements, preparing the set of an upcoming production. Theatre people, Michael’s kind of people, the cult who are conserved in the Hamburg’s Theatersammlung. Which reminds me of something: the page I scanned from Thalia’s Vorstellungbuch, describing events the night of 20 January 1967. Sitting in a row, overlooking the stage, I pull up the image for Sandra Asche.